My 2025 address book of online artisan cheese shops, bakeries, meat & fish suppliers

A tested collection to bookmark, curated and added to over years. Not a definitive list and not just for the upcoming festivities but a joyful cluster of the places I rate most highly.

Colston Bassett stilton and Shepherd's Purse blue cheese: just two of the world class cheeses you can buy online

Last year I dived (dove?) deep into my archive of The Trusted Ones to bring you a carefully honed list of tried and tested suppliers. I’ve just written a Substack note about this newsletter that’s prompted me to rewrite the intro as for years I lived in an area of south London where, unlikely as it sounds, there was no good butcher within a five-mile radius, no fishmonger of reliable quality, no greengrocer and no good deli. The nearest farmer’s market was okay but it only happened one morning a month, on a Sunday. Easy to miss, in other words.

It used to infuriate me when magazines and writers glibly stated ‘Ask your butcher to bone out the chicken for you’ or ‘Ask your fishmonger to do the filleting’. All we had close by was a small, fairly ropy supermarket selling peppered mackerel and flabby bits of cod and haddock. It’s easy to get good meat, veg and cheese where I live now in rural Leicestershire as farm shops are plentiful and the food miles for local meat are virtually zero. But I haven’t forgotten what it feels like not to have this excellence on your doorstep. If you like to know where your food comes from, how it’s been produced and the degree of care taken in its production, fantastic online suppliers (of which there are so many in the UK now) are your saviour.

When friends ask me to recommend my favourites I’m always ready with a list, so here, updated for 2025’s approaching season of joy and gathering, is my collection of online cheese shops, bakeries, meat, fish and charcuterie suppliers, other artisan producers and online shops that deserve a raft of plaudits for the quality of goods they sell. We all know how tough it is in the current economic climate to make a resource- and labour-hungry artisan food business successful. I’m talking rent, rates, rising staff costs, increasing price of feed for animals, ingredients for product-crafting, milk, heating, electricity and so on. Yet still (thank goodness) there are people who continue to pour their dedication, graft and passion into making the best or sourcing and selling the best.

This guide will, I hope, be useful as thoughts turn towards buying gifts and treats for the December home table, but the list is designed to be referred to year-round.

Here, without further ado, are the star performers, including an offer on spices from a new, brilliant company…